


Pixies in Trees

by pyrrhical (anoyo)



Series: Repeat 'Verse [7]
Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Difficult to Read Alone, Gen, M/M, Not Happy, Repeat 'Verse, Stiles in college
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-31
Updated: 2017-12-31
Packaged: 2019-02-24 16:30:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 671
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13217664
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anoyo/pseuds/pyrrhical
Summary: The only thing better than finals week was finals week with added pixies.





	Pixies in Trees

**Author's Note:**

  * For [iMOCKusALL](https://archiveofourown.org/users/iMOCKusALL/gifts).



> So this, too, was owed AGES ago, so I made it one of this year's holiday fics! This is for iMOCKusALL, who is really just very lovely and deserves all the ficlets. ♥
> 
> Beta'd by the wonderful dirty_diana.
> 
> Happy Holidays!

The only thing better than finals week was finals week with added pixies.

Stiles had done his best to avoid the supernatural since arriving at Berkeley, and he’d mostly succeeded. “Mostly,” because while he’d managed to keep himself out of the chaos, he hadn’t quite managed to let it go unseen. He told himself that was just because eyes, once opened, couldn’t be closed. 

Really, it was because his first instinct was still to _fix it_ , no matter how many times that impulse had kicked his ass in the past. 

There was a pack in Berkeley, but it was the local coven that dealt with the supernatural issues in the area, not the wolves. On the way to his Calc 5 exam, Stiles spotted a witch standing in the middle of campus, staring forlornly at the tree where the pixies had built their stronghold. It took almost everything Stiles had in him to walk past, without telling her that the best strategy was to find them somewhere more interesting to live, and not to just try to shoo or scare them away. He told himself that the pixies weren’t hurting anything -- hadn’t hurt anything, not yet. 

It didn’t help. 

Other things that didn’t help, in no particular order:

The fact that while Stiles was maintaining perfect grades and impressing professors left and right, he had no one to tell. His classmates didn’t care, or simply wrote him off as bragging, and when Stiles let himself think about who he _might_ tell, all he felt was pain, loneliness, and shame. He had left; he had made that choice. Knowing that didn’t make him feel any less alone, and remembering all his good, valid reasons didn’t keep him from thinking about how he could have handled it differently.

His memories of the pixies of Beacon Hills, and the mostly-benign, but intensely irritating, adventure that went along with them. Pixies were some of the most annoying creatures Stiles had ever encountered. That didn’t make them terrifying, the way most of the other encounters had been. Honestly, they were only dangerous in large numbers, and even then only when provoked. No one had been seriously injured, and they’d all had a lot of laughs after the fact. Not all of Stiles’ memories were bad.

The fact that not all of Stiles’ memories were bad, and the pixies were making him admit it. If he was being honest, he had more happy, or at least contented, memories than he did sad, or painful. The problem was the degree of bad versus good, and even that lost a lot of its power, with a year and a half to look back. Even little things -- Scott’s surprised laugh when Allison bought him flowers, the way Boyd looked at Erica like she’d hung the moon, Lydia correcting their math substitute in a vastly terrifying moment of profound irritation -- slipped in and out of his mind, increasing in frequency, the longer the pixies were around.

The way the witch had looked at him, the one time he’d accidentally made eye contact, like she could sense him -- like she knew what he was, what he had abandoned, and where he ought to be. Stiles had guilt about leaving, but it wasn’t much. Even when he knew he could have handled it differently, he didn’t feel guilty about leaving to protect himself. He only felt guilty about how it had gone down. Mostly, in the end, with Derek.

None of those things helped, not really, no matter how well college was going.

Especially not when Stiles was on his way to his Calc 5 final, wishing he could help, barely convincing himself that he shouldn’t, and remembering that even if he aced his final, nothing changed. It was a blip on the radar. When finals were over, and the pixies were gone, Stiles would go back to enjoying college and only feeling his depression and loneliness in the dark, quiet hours of the morning. But until then: the pixies really didn’t help.


End file.
